Tuesday, 1 January 2013

New Year, New Blog

2013 is a year full of fat possibilities and what a sunny day for the beginning of the year, makes a nice change from the apparent 6 weeks of rain that we are meant to be having. I realise now that I've jinxed us to a massive downpour but it was lovely to spend the morning bathed in sunshine - bring on the vitamin D!

In other news the lemonade made a vicious attack on the laptop. It's in a recovery downward dog position and has been for the last 24 hours. I'm hoping, somewhat vainly that the situation will resolve itself and miraculously I will be able to turn it on and everything will work wonderfully. I cannot even begin to list all the items, program's, photos (sob) ad infinitum that is stored on there. I'm wondering whether a little hair dryer manipulation will help but I don't want to fry it further. There is a grand little IT shop at the other end of town which has been there since the 80s and despite it's rather unassuming decor, we are desperately confident that they will be able to extract all the salient information. Just goes to show that you can't trust carbonated beverages.

The intense smell of the dying Christmas tree is making me sneeze and sneeze and sneeze. I know we are supposed to wait, traditionally, until 6th January before we take down the decorations but I'm not sure my nose will survive that long or necessarily whether the Christmas tree will last that long! Perhaps there will be a smidge of sale shopping in the form of looking for an artificial tree for next year. Then again my aversion to any and all shopping that doesn't include food is pretty much clad in stone.

Last night I watched Julie & Julia - again - and loved, loved it so much that I decided to refresh my blog and hopefully engage in lots more cooking. I'm not saying that I'm planning to cook 500 odd recipes in a year but I truly hope I can make excellent use of the many cookbooks I own. I just hope that our waistlines can survive!!

GoodReads

Despite being the classic guide to writing non fiction, this book is excellent for any and all aspiring writers. Zinsser deals with style, pace, finding your voice and remembering your audience. He warns us away from cliches and encourag...

It's more of a 3.5 than a 3 to be fair. I liked the continuation of Leiter, I enjoyed the descriptions of Harlem and Mr Big and his voodoo - I have not seen the film. The danger and the tricks and the flesh eating fish are all great touc...

At first I felt too old to be reading this book, it felt very definitely young however as my imagination started to build the clankers and Darwinians I managed to get past it. A slow start but once I was able to sit for a spell and reall...